There have been happenings. It has been a little chaotic, a little overwhelming, and a little hilarious.
A week ago we were parked outside on the street in Chicago and a U-Haul cargo van backed into the front right side of my car and drove away. I saw it happen but didn’t get a plate number. This meant filing a police report (nothing to do about it unfortunately) and taking my car in for an estimate this past weekend. Now my car will be in the shop for 2 days, at least we have Shea’s.
The big event, however, was on Friday night. Shea and I met up at his train stop and went together from work, a little after 5 pm. For those of you who don’t know, our commute is at least 1 hr 15 minutes, on a good day, door to door. Some days it takes longer. We were cheerfully headed home when, just past the Howard stop, the train shook, shrieked, and ground to a halt.
As bad as riding the CTA is sometimes, it usually doesn’t do that. Pretty immediately we figured out that one of the cars on the train had derailed. They ushered us onto the first 2 cars of the train while they tried to figure out what to do…which meant that we were all packed like sardines…for 1 hour and 45 minutes. One young lady was telling someone that her date was waiting at the train platform behind us…and the whole car started asking her questions about how they met and where they were going for dinner. It was pretty great.
We got our information about what was happening from Twitter, friends/family outside the train, & news sites, but we had no real idea of when we’d be able to leave. At around 8:00 pm they finally informed us that they had pulled another train alongside ours and had set up planks to allow us to walk across. The firefighters assisted and everyone transferred cars. By the time we pulled back into Howard Station it was around 8:20 and we decided to take Uber home. I didn’t walk in the front door until 8:45.
All told, it took us nearly 4 hours to get home on Friday night. Whew!
